Ritual and Rhetoric in Presidential Politics

Belief, it may seem, is the bedrock of cultural anthropology. In fact, though, we can move from belief to discourse without the loss of anything essential…. There must be a place for representations (held to be true) of information; of knowledge of past, present, and future states of the world; of contingent relationships among phenomena; and of our own and others' mental states and processes–in short, of any conceivable factual matter. These are what people call beliefs.